penthius

The architect before publication was a broke college student working sweeping up hair strands from a local barbershop. He was allergic to the smell of coffee, and so barista work was out, as well as restaurant server. The architect after publication was...waiting. He was waiting to see if his print design succeeded, if it took off, if there was anything else he could do to help it or to make it happen. It was a simple enough design, written so that it could be fabbed off of a single truck-size mobile printer, instead of requiring a store-size printer or an industrial printer. That was the whole point of it, to him, to be able to design a good, thought-out structure that almost anybody could make. Traveling fabs were everywhere, much as traveling libraries used to be in the old days before libraries were everywhere, and so he knew that there *must* be people needing it. He thought that maybe he should have designed something simpler. A doghouse, maybe, or a garden shed. Something specialized to the needs of farmers, whatever those were. Something that people might actually look for in the catalog. He began to despair, and to wonder how many more years of sweeping up hair cuttings his back would hold up for. And then the storm wiped out most of the east coast, and he became rich overnight. Also orphaned from not only his parents but most of his family, since they'd lived on the coast since--

Inspiration: Email subject line: "Pre-Pub-Architect-5"
Story potential: High, but not for this story.
Notes: I like the fab set-up, and the architect part, but it should not be as straightforward as this freewriting exercise. And the tone's all wrong.

The greeting card street has expanded past control, which is a bit of a problem in the rest of book-town. Sure, it's all in response to market demand, and the tourists love it, they just absolutely love being able to wander a street filled with houses built of cards, and being able to see the card characters pouring each other tea and telling each other that they don't know what they'd do without close friends like you, and then the tourists go and buy the card to take home with them, maybe to put in an album, maybe to show their friends as a "you won't believe what I saw," or maybe to actually send as a card to their friends and family, as appropriate. The problem is that the whole town was designed to respond to demand, although with a few reserves in case of genres going extinct and being unable to reproduce once conditions improve. New genres rise up all the time and expand into deserted neighborhoods--you don't want to visit the urban fantasy section, that's all I'm saying. We insist that the tourists take someone with them from the police procedural section (and *not* one of the villains!) if they go to visit there. It’s almost as bad as the serial killer non-fiction, truth tho tell, at least in terms of minor characters (like the tourists) getting damaged without any warning or foreshadowing that can be easily detected and avoided by our experienced guides. But where was I? Oh, yes, greeting cards.

Inspiration: Googling "greetings to the great king" -> greeting cards in Great Portland Street
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Fforde does it better.

The manor was turned halfway inside-out when the architect died, and so it stayed afterwards, since nobody could figure out what the architect had done or persuade the manor to obey any other spells. This suited the patriarch of the family at the time just fine, since he had hired the architect specifically to create something unusual, and this certainly qualified! At that time, too, the family's finances were more in order and they could afford the extra servants to properly get things done between the two halves and the hazard pay that sometimes became necessary if a servant walked through the wrong door in the wrong phase of time. They posted signs as soon as such things happened, and so the house proliferated with warning labels, but over time this approach was able to reduce the incidence of a disappearance down to one perhaps every ten years, and that was easy enough to blame on a parlormaid running away or footman stealing a piece of jewelry from a guest. The signs stayed up, though, because if it went back to the way it had been it would be much more difficult to--

Inspiration: Today's Google Doodle in honor of Antoni Gaudi.
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like this. It feels whimsically charming. Rather Chrestomanci-esque.

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The Architect: Science Fiction

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Halfway Inside-Out: Fantasy

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